Chile: Election Likely to Show Big Political Shifts

Chilean politics in the run-up to national presidential and legislative elections on November 19 have revealed that – within major lines of continuity – significant changes in the political alignments that have structured the country’s democracy since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990 are taking place.

Continuity is most pronounced on the conservative side of the political spectrum, where the two main conservative parties, Renovación Nacional (RN) and Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), have joined forces with smaller parties to sponsor the presidential candidacy of billionaire business mogul and former President Sebastián Piñera. In public opinion surveys of voter intentions, Piñera has maintained a healthy lead over a collection of centrist and leftist candidates. He appears likely to come out on top in the first round of voting – and significant abstention (if fewer than 5.5 million registered voters vote) could push him over the top. If he is forced into a run-off, the final outcome will rest heavily on the ability of his opponents in the divided center-left bloc to coalesce forces.

The center-left space is where most change is concentrated. The core parties in the Nueva Mayoría coalition that backed incumbent Socialist President Michelle Bachelet have won five of Chile’s six presidential elections since the transition to democracy in 1990. For the first time, however, the main centrist party, the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC), has opted out of the alliance to run its own candidate, Senator Carolina Goic. With Goic languishing in the polls, however, the primary challengers to Piñera are located further to the left, including the Nueva Mayoría’s favorite, Senator Alejandro Guillier. Although early speculation pegged him as an outsider, he is now firmly identified with the moderate reformist left and represents continuity with the current government.

A new left-leaning group, the Frente Amplio, has nominated Beatriz Sánchez, an independent journalist. She arguably represents a larger challenge to the status quo, as her candidacy gives political expression to social actors who are sharply critical of Chile’s political establishment and the neoliberal economic model. Even though the Broad Front’s electoral strength is untested, it brings together a number of small parties alienated from Nueva Mayoría and inspired by Chile’s massive student protest movement and other activist networks that have mobilized around labor, environmental, and pension reform issues in recent years. Sánchez favors more redistributive taxation and greater state intervention in strategic enterprises and utilities, as well as in water property rights and forestry where social conflict has been high. She is also for replacing the private pensions system with a mixed public-private one and getting private banking out of the student loan business.

This election will likely show that the broad center-left coalition that dominated Chilean politics since the 1990 transition has effectively splintered, with the Christian Democrats seeking to carve out an independent space in the political center and a movement-based alternative emerging on the mainstream parties’ left flank. Uniting such disparate forces to compete against Piñera in a run-off election, should one be required, will clearly be a formidable task. Nueva Mayoría candidate Alejandro Guillier, considered the strongest run-off candidate to take on Piñera, is already in conversation with Christian Democrats and Sánchez’s Frente Amplio. In a run-off, he is thought likely to get around 60 percent of the Christian Democratic vote, with more conservative Christian Democrats voting for Piñera. His appeal to Frente Amplio voters could suffer because of their unhappiness with Nueva Mayoría.

The specter of high abstention looms large for second-round voting, too. President Bachelet’s low approval ratings for most of her second term in office, although recently reversed, signaled low enthusiasm despite her successful pushing through a series of major reforms, including a reform of the electoral law to enhance proportional representation, a tax reform to increase revenues for social programs, the initiation of free university education for low-income students, and a much-debated law to legalize abortions in limited circumstances. Last, but not least, mainstream parties across the board have been weakened by a series of corruption and campaign finance scandals, leaving many citizens alienated from parties.

November 2, 2017

*Eduardo Silva is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, and Kenneth Roberts is Professor of Government at Cornell University.